And this is what Christians have believed for our nearly 2,000 year history. See a section of a letter from Mathetes to Diognetus, circa A.D. 150 as he describes the distinctive lives of Christians:

Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.

They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. (Literally, Christians “do not cast away fetuses”).

They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh.

Christians ought to have a completely different mindset than those around us. We do not destroy our unborn children! Yet in America, land of the selfish, thousands of abortions each year are committed by those who self-identify as Christians, Evangelical and otherwise. They are Christian like I am giraffe.

“There are some women among you who by drinking special potions extinguish the life of the future human in their very bowels, thus committing murder before they even give birth.” (Mark Felix, Christian Lawyer, Octavius chap. 30 from 170 AD).

“Now we allow that life begins with conception because we contend that the soul also begins from conception; life taking its commencement at the same moment and place that the soul does” (Tertullian, Apology 27 from 210 AD).

“Women also who administer drugs to cause abortion, as well as those who take poisons to destroy unborn children, are murderesses.” (First Canonical Letter from 374 AD).

“The law, moreover enjoins us to bring up all our offspring, and forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward; and if any woman appears to have so done, she will be a murderer of her child, by destroying a living creature, and diminishing humankind.” (The Works of Josephus, Flavius Josephus Against Apion, Book II, 25).

“Some go so far as to take potions, that they may insure barrenness, and thus murder human beings almost before their conception. Some, when they find themselves with child through their sin, use drugs to procure abortion, and when, as often happens, they die with their offspring, they enter the lower world laden with the guilt not only of adultery against Christ but also of suicide and child murder” (Jerome, Letters 22:13 from 396 AD).

Let us stand with the ancient Christian witness, and with the Word of God: “You shall not murder.”

On the edge of the legalization of abortion-on-demand, a California Medicine journal article from September 1970 told the truth, and the whole truth. Keep in mind, this is a pro-abortion editorial I’m quoting from:

Since the old [Judeo-Christian] ethic [of the sanctity of life] has not yet been fully displaced [by the new ethic which places relative rather than absolute value on human lives] it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death.

The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected. [1]

With the above quote in mind, what kind of people do you think are in charge of this nation, who unashamedly approve of the homicide of millions of kids? Better question: what kind of people are we all, that we not only allow this to continue, but actually approve of it by our votes in the ballot box and in our silence?

The American Spectator has a lucid article critiquing this Orwellian moment. Paul Kengor writes

It reminds me of the Planned Parenthood abortion clinic nearest to me, which has windows with colorful drawings and balloons, the look of a cheerful daycare center. The difference, however, is that mom and child walk in, but the child never returns. That’s really what Planned Parenthood “is about.”

Just like the California Medicine article above noted. We all know what is happening in the abortion mills around our nation. We know what kind of people we are, and we are experts in covering it up with medicine, entertainment, and self-help jargon.

I’m reminded of some cutting words of Yahweh through the prophet Jeremiah. Although the context is ancient Judah, yet the prophecy is fresh and precise applied to the apostate Church in America. Read it all:

5:20 “Declare this in the house of Jacob
And proclaim it in Judah [AmeriKa], saying,21 ‘Hear this now, O foolish people,
Without understanding,
Who have eyes and see not,
And who have ears and hear not:22 Do you not fear Me?’ says Yahweh.
‘Will you not tremble at My presence,
Who have placed the sand as the bound of the sea,
By a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass beyond it?
And though its waves toss to and fro,
Yet they cannot prevail;
Though they roar, yet they cannot pass over it.23 But this people has a defiant and rebellious heart;They have revolted and departed.24 They do not say in their heart,
“Let us now fear the Lord our God,
Who gives rain, both the former and the latter, in its season.
He reserves for us the appointed weeks of the harvest.”25 Your iniquities have turned these things away,
And your sins have withheld good from you.

26 ‘For among My people are found wicked men;
They lie in wait as one who sets snares;
They set a trap;
They catch men.27 As a cage is full of birds,
So their houses are full of deceit.
Therefore they have become great and grown rich.28 They have grown fat, they are sleek;
Yes, they surpass the deeds of the wicked;They do not plead the cause,The cause of the fatherless;
Yet they prosper,
And the right of the needy they do not defend.29 Shall I not punish them for these things?’ says Yahweh.
‘Shall I not avenge Myself on such a nation as this?’

30 “An astonishing and horrible thing
Has been committed in the land:31 The prophets prophesy falsely,And the priests rule by their own power;And My people love to have it so.But what will you do in the end? (NKJV)

Yesterday I commented on and linked to a ghastly article on salon.com written by Mary Elizabeth Williams. In it she asserts that unborn human beings do not have a right to life as compared to those stronger than them. Her final sentence of the article is the chilling conclusion that an unborn child is “a life worth sacrificing.”

This morning I have been listening to the January 29, 2013 podcast of Issues, Etc. from Lutheran Public Radio.

On this program, Scott Klusendorf shared his insight into Williams’ salon.com article, cutting down her rhetoric to expose the naked, post-modern power-play just beneath the surface.

I recorded some of his comments:

[Williams] is essentially saying there is one class of human beings that you can set aside and kill, and there’s another class you can’t. [We have] a marvelous opportunity to step up and say . . .

Listen, I believe that each and every human being has an equal right to life regardless of that human beings size, gender, race, level of development, or degree of dependency.

I believe that each and every human being has an equal right to life. [Williams] denies that central premise. She believes that only some humans have a right to life based on some accidental and fleeting thing that may come or go in the course of your lifetime, such as your dependency needs.

Which view, the pro-life view or the alleged “pro-choice” view does the better job of explaining human equality?

Lincoln argued that any way you argued for enslaving the black man will work equally well to enslave many whites, and you say man A is white, man B is dark, the white skin having the right to enslave the dark skin man, well take care because by that rule you’re a slave to the first person you meet who has skin fairer than your own.

It comes down to this: [Williams] says a fetus doesn’t have a right to life; therefore a fetus doesn’t have a right to life.

This is power politics; this isn’t any kind of rational argument… if there is indeed a class of human beings that can be set aside to be killed because they don’t meet her standard, you can’t just isolate out one victim class, namely the unborn, and say that doesn’t apply to anybody else.

If living independent is what gives us value, then those that depend on any kind of medical device forfeit their right to life, as do conjoined twins. There is no rational argument for why this applies only to the unborn, and not to anyone else.

—

We’ve really come this far. Don’t compromise with this type of monstrous worldview, my friends, but pray for our enemies.

Read this honest, horrifying article from Mary Elizabeth Williams of salon.com. Really read it, and let her very last sentence simply rest on your mind for a few moments. Then come back and read my assessment. Here’s an excerpt, and then the link right below it:

“Yet I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.”

Shocked?

This should come as no surprise. For decades the abortion rights crowd has been struggling in vain to argue that a child in utero is not a human life, tacitly admitting the immoral nature of, well, killing kids. The debate has centered on where and when life begins – pro-life advocates arguing correctly that it begins at conception, and pro-death advocates arguing it begins… some other time.

The debate has been an argument in semantics. The pro-death crowd has known all along that abortion is murder, but it would not have been very convenient politically to go around mere decades after the holocaust openly arguing that some people are less worthy of life than others, and may be legally murdered by those who are stronger.

Well, no longer is such a deception quite necessary. It seems that in the midst of our rapidly declining culture, the unbreakable focus on self-pleasure has opened the way for some brutal honesty in the pro-death crowd. Our collective idol is surely the glorification of the self, and so as events and people threaten the promotion and happiness of self, any means necessary becomes permissible in continuing on the path of -ME FIRST-.

HEDONIST HULK SMASH

We see this on a national scale – for at least 70 years, we have been willing to send our military into other peoples’ countries if there is a threat to our economic interests. The CIA has busily toppled one harmless government after another (killing off countless civilians) in pursuit of more favorable business conditions for our major corporations. We invade, bomb, break, and steal in pursuit of happiness.

In the past 10 years, we have reached the new heights of openly practicing torture on non-combatants, keeping people in prison camps who have not been charged with any crime or been found taking up arms against our country. We are viciously committed to our way of life, willing to kill anyone who blocks our path to personal Valhalla. We smash the people and things that stop us from pleasuring ourselves.

Too bad for children

Kids are a gift in the ways we need them most. They teach us infinitely more about self-sacrifice and self-giving than anything else can. They become our greatest contribution to the world as we train them up and teach them the ways of righteousness, ingenuity, and selfless love for others. But they do put a crimp in our style. They whine, they cry, they disobey. They have bedtimes that keep us from going out and drinking ourselves into the latest STDs, and they demand more of us than we feel we have to give. They oftentimes take us down a notch or two on the financial ladder of life. That’s really the final straw for many Americans. We smash the people that stop us from pleasuring ourselves.

Did we really think abortion was about something else?

I know that there are many different, nuanced reasons that women get abortions, but underneath each of those reasons is a lie. She is hearing a lie that she is believing, and the victim will be her own daughter or son. Counting all the “surgical” abortions and birth control pill abortions over the past 50 years, America and the West have hundreds of millions of murdered children on our hands. That’s a lot of happiness being pursued, I guess.

And how are we doing on that happiness thing? We’re the most heavily medicated nation on earth, by far. We live and function on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. We’re miserable in so many ways. Oops – maybe we didn’t kill enough of us?

I wonder how long it will take for our nation, our culture to realize the pursuit of happiness is on a self-forgetting path, and it runs like a dagger right through the beating heart of self-centeredness.

Until we get that, we’re the puppets of tyrants, we’re the puppets of devils, and we’re the puppets of these evil hearts within us.

*News came today that Planned Parenthood will officially be changing its name to Minority Population Reduction Centers of AmeriKa. A spokesmonster for the murder corporation stated

We have operated for over half a century in this nation under the thin guise of family planning and women’s health, but after much soul searching and input from our donors, we have decided to represent ourselves more accurately. We believe that since it is the minority women of America which are willingly coming in our doors to exterminate their next generation, we ought not to pretend any longer that our agenda is any different than theirs. We are proudly the Minority Population Reduction Centers of AmeriKa.

Reactions across the media have been mixed, as some seem to desire to retain the cloak of health care language which has facilitated the genocide of AmeriKa’s black and Hispanic populations. Most of the rich, white males who have operated as doctors in the former Planned Parenthood operation have not been reached for comment, as they are busy tearing the limbs off of the next black President of the United States.

As this story develops, we will keep you updated on further details. For now, we will leave you with an inspiring quote from the founder of Planned Parenthood/Minority Population Reduction Centers of AmeriKa.

“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with
social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most
successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal.
We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro
population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if
it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
— Margaret Sanger’s December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255
Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. Original source: Sophia Smith
Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts. Also described in
Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth
Control in America . New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.

We’re repelled when we see someone’s natural ability to think and question being squelched. No one wants to be controlled or made a parrot of someone else’s thinking. Yet ironically this is the easiest state to fall into, for any of us.

1984 Every Day

There is always a level of group-think going on in a culture; we would not be able to live together without similar beliefs and worldview. Yet a great problem for so many people throughout history has been the inability to think about that worldview critically: to think outside of standard assumptions they hold so as to inspect it for consistency. The easiest example is Nazi Germany – we’d all like to think if we were there we would have been the one standing against the flow of the nation. We’d like to think.

We are all caught in some level of group-think, Orwellian style. We would make good little proles in his famous novel 1984. In it doublethink is coined and defined this way:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

Do you think you would recognize if that were your mindset? Want to check? Ask yourself something critical here: if you knew that justice was being perverted for a specific class of people, would you try to expose it… no matter the personal cost? If the right to life was being denied a certain helpless group, would you try to help them, or would you protect yourself by engaging in Orwellian doublethink?

Check yourself.

What is it that grows inside the womb of a pregnant woman? Is it an individual human with all the rights inherent to you or me? Or is it just an impersonal “part” of the woman’s body? In many places in America if someone murders a pregnant woman, there are two resultant murder charges – yet at the same exact time, on the same city block, a rich white male gets paid by the government to dismember a poor black child inside of a scared, confused girl. No murder charges: the police protect him at his office and in his mansion in the nearby suburbs.

See there? At least half of the 300,000,000 people in this country willfully force themselves into doublethink right here on the “X” where the nuclear bomb of social chaos has fallen.

Some are so good at doublethink that they brazenly fight for abortion “rights,” telling men to “keep your laws off of my body.” I just want to ask, “what about the law that protects you from someone murdering you?” Should we keep that law off your body? And… is your child’s body also your body? She may be dependent on you for 9 months, but is dependence on another the line between human and not? She has a different DNA than you – she is not your body. Is it your right to dismember her?

The Nazis redefined Jews as less-than-human, and slaughtered them in the millions. The Americans redefined children who breath oxygen through a placenta as less-than-human, and have made Hitler’s slaughter look like a shabby failure.

And yet we will go on with our day, enjoying our privileges and comforts – all while the gas chambers are stuffed full of human beings all over again, every day in this land.

Then think about this: if more than half the nation is hypnotized and blinded to something so obvious and grotesque, what other things are we all hypnotized by? In what ways are we blinded to truth and reality – putting everyone, indeed the earth itself in great danger?

How can a society have liberty when the mind is enslaved by the mind?

How can a society grow positively and flourish when it devours its own children?

How can a society survive when the men are children/adolescent until 45 years old?

How can you be free from the tyranny of doublethink?

And how does one break free of the matrix of deceit inside of which we are all born?

There is an answer. Would you even want it, if it cost you everything you think you need?

As are we. The cost of unlimited self-serving pleasure – the dreams of our free-love, 1960’s revolutionary parents realized! The cost is only and simply the devouring of our children and collapse of our societies. Does this need much more commentary and argument?

The cost of embracing a stranger in fornication is merely a murder. The cost of loving oneself above all things is only the dislocation of everything in life. How cheap!

When this was filmed and released, it was 1977. As you watch this most important episode, think about how accurate Dr. Schaeffer was in his predictions about the future. Perhaps you may also find something he says to have been inaccurate–watch for that too, but all in all, I recommend you listen very carefully, receive the interpretation of the world which he gives, and allow your mind and heart to be shaped by the same Spirit who moved in Dr. Schaeffer. I believe if any of you have the Holy Spirit, you will not be able to blithely dismiss this dire warning, or for that matter, dismiss the hope which is held out towards the end of the episode.

I would call your attention to a very interesting detail in this video: out of the 10 episodes, it is the only one in which Dr. Schaeffer cracks a smile. Watch for it, and notice what it is that brings this smile to his face. We ought to be grateful for God’s grace given to this brother, and for his work in worldview, philosophy, and ethics. I have benefited greatly in studying his work– and this blog is in part a product of men like Dr. Schaeffer’s passion in this world.